When Mikhail Khodorkovsky was a boy in the Soviet Union, he spent summers with his great-grandmother in Kharkiv. “It was a long time ago, and I thought I’d forgotten all those years,” he says. “But when I saw the footage of the Kharkiv bombing, and when I saw people [taking refuge] in the Kharkiv metro, everything just turned upside down inside me.”
Khodorkovsky — once Russia’s richest man and now one of its prominent dissidents — is not the emotional type. If he were, he wouldn’t have thrived in the wild-west privatisations of the 1990s. Nor perhaps would he have survived the decade in prison that made him a symbol of opposition to Vladimir Putin. In person he’s unfashionably, off-puttingly unsentimental: he often ends reflections on Ukraine with dark smiles. “Yes, yes, dark sense of humour and sarcasm are my outstanding features. This is why I like the British.” Khordokovsky, now 58 years old, has been based in London with his wife since 2015.
Even so, the war has shaken him. When it started, he stopped sleeping. Now he criticises the west for not realising what’s at stake. “If we don’t manage to deal with this plague in Ukraine, we’ll have to face it in other territories,” he says, through an interpreter.